Thursday, November 10, 2011

Samoa judo World Cup

41 of us aussies arrived in Samoa early on Wednesday morning. We had a quick 2 hour snooze, did some shopping and then went to do some judo late Wednesday afternoon. It is really hot and humid here and it rained all day. This meant that when you do any sort of physical activity you seat more than ever.

My weight here is not too bad and unfortunately I will need to sweat a bit in order to make weight- although there is no better place to sweat than here. I made a rookie mistake last night by accidently falling asleep at around 730pm only to wake again at 11pm. My aim was to stay awake till at least 10pm and then sleep throughout the night and catch up my body clock to Samoa time. Buy like I said I woke up at 11pm was awake for about an hour so I listened to a few church podcasts before falling asleep and sleeping right through to 8am.

Today we left for training at 830am so I had a quick breakfast and trained with club member Debbie hill and the session was run by my club and national coach Tom Hill. We did a variety of gymnastic drills to warm up followed by some moving uchikomi. This was followed by speed uchikomi 6 sets of 5 repeats 3 times. Then we did some shark bait style of training (1 person out the front getting a new partner every 1 minute) before doing our own training for the last 20 minutes. I did some light ne waza and tachi waza randori.

Today we are not doing too much the heavy weight men and light weight women fight tomorrow so they will not be doing too much. My club mate Duke Didier is fighting tomorrow. He is looking big and strong as always and I am keen on seeing how he performs.

I think we are gong to do a quick bit of sightseeing – we are going to a place called cave rock or rock cave or something like that but the key is not to get sunburnt and not to over exert myself. Although this close to competition many people tend to sit in their rooms all day watching movies on the hard drive and doing nothing. This tends to leave you slow, lethargic and plain tired. Doing something distracts you from the stresses and nerves of competition and will allow you to enjoy yourself while still keeping your head in the game as such.

Anyway you guys have a great day,

I am off to call my wife and say hello but you have a wonderful week. Don’t forget to follow the competition at www.ippon.org